Steve Downton, Downton Service Management Consultants Ltd, Noventum Group
The whole character of customer service has been turned on its head over the last 10 years and the losers seem to be the service suppliers and not the customers. So suppliers need to address how to bring service delivery back to being a profitable aspect of business.
Suppliers should concentrate on the value their customer brings and consider adopting the customer value cycle which looks at the value to both the supplier and the customer of their relationship, rather than just one side winning at the expense of the other in a short term contest. The key to this method of relationship evaluation is the ability to measure the value − yet very few businesses are able to do this even if they wanted to. The stress is on the intangible value of customers and the importance of having satisfied customers. But there is no doubt that those companies having tangible customer evaluation have gained significant benefit.
One of the reasons why it has been hard to demonstrate the value of customers is that it is only relatively recently with the installation of new systems, that companies have been able to measure accurately the value of individual customers to a business. In many cases companies have only been too glad to just have a customer buying their product.
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